Running hot and cold
Got me a plumber, one of those rare chaps of mystery and legend, this one was one who I’d been in touch with and he found time in his calendar and agreed to come over and do the work.
I was going to work that day so I made arrangements to hide the key and have him do all the work without me being there.
The remit was pretty simple, fit a pump that would be triggered by a thermostat to actively feed the thermal store with water from the stove back-boiler. Once this was done then the idea was to fit a radiator manifold to the upstairs radiator circuit. This would mean that the upstairs radiators would no longer work but it would allow me to fit radiators one at a time as I completed rooms upstairs, while ripping out the narsty copper based system that had been installed.
Factoid – A radiator manifold is like an underfloor heating manifold without the mixer valve. Basically traditional radiators operate on a circuit – like old Ethernet networking, one circuit one after another… such a geek – whereas with a manifold one has a star, each radiator is fitted with its own circuit. It means for a lot more piping but if you use plastic pipe then that’s no great problem. It means that each radiator can be very easily isolated, it means that balancing can be done centrally with inbuilt dinky flow-meters, it means that all radiators heat at the same time, it means that with some tech’ you too can have hyper-cool room thermostats linked to actuators at the manifold to make for perfect control (I’m not going to that extreme, although I do have a two zone Nest system, but it’s there if I want to). It’s very much like modern star based Ethernet. Most plumbers hate the idea, perhaps because once the manifold is installed it can easily be tackled by a DIY’er, maybe it’s more to do with them not liking new tech, plumbers seem to be mostly change adverse, whereas IT people embrace new tech’ … ring based Ethernet is never used nowadays.
Anyway I spent the day at work, visited my folks afterwards and got back to my home at around eight.
Apologies for the video but my camera packed in halfway through the filming – just another element of the bad luck I had that day.
What a sight, I got through the front door and was immediately met by the tick-ticking of a drip into a bucket in my living room.
I wandered up to the thermal store and it was continually refilling, not good, but the manifold was fitted exactly as I wanted – so that was a positive – and the new pump was there and ready to go.
I remained calm and phoned the plumber. I must admit I was incredulous when he told me he’d left the house with the drip still dripping through my ceiling, I was also amazed that when I told him the bucket was nearly full, he simple swatted that aside with “it was half full when I put it under the drip”, he’d not even bothered emptying it.
Still I remained calm, I needed him back and I needed his help and very helpful he turned out to be.
It seemed that he thought that the drip would have stopped very quickly, he thought it was just some remedial water stuck in the system and it would have soon be cleared. Telling him about the tank refilling, he dismissed that as a gunked up valve slowing down the refill but it seemed to me that there was something more problematic.
Anyway he gave me some suggestions and I set about them once I got off the phone.
Firstly though I found he cap for the pipe that was dripping wasn’t fitted properly so I screwed it on tighly and within a half an hour the tank stopped filling and the drip stopped dripping, it seemed to me that the dripping pipe was still somehow fitted to the store, despite being isolated. I then tried to switch on the downstairs heating and nothing happened, try as I might but not a sausage.
I rang the plumber back and my new suspicion was his chief suspect.
What seems to have happened was that the idiots who put in the original system had not totally isolated the upstairs from the downstairs systems. There were separate flows for upstairs and down but a common return shared between upstairs and downstairs. This meant that this pipe would have never stopped dripping…. ever…. as it was still being fed directly from the tank, which was why it was constantly refilling.
So it wasn’t the plumber’s problem, so I was glad that I hadn’t got all huffy.
It’s good that I’m taking the complete system out, not only are there design problems but there are inconsistencies with pipe formats throughout the house. Some radiators get hot, some cool and one never comes on at all. This rubber-stamped my decision to do a major overhaul.
Anyway luckily for me I’d taken the Monday off work following this plumbing and the plumber agreed to come over and complete the work and put a second return for the upstairs. I spent a freezing day with him working on the plumbing, while I suffered on the cusp of a nasty spot of the lurgy.
Everything now works well, the pump though a good idea really doesn’t work too well, it relies on the heating getting to a certain temperature before it starts pumping. If you set the thermostat too high then it never comes on, if you set it too low then it continually pumps, circulating cool water from the back boiler of the fire into the thermal store. There’s also a problem with cold water from the thermal store going into the back-boiler once the pump starts up for the first time, lots of problems.
So I did a bit of reading.
What you need is a loading valve pump, a Laddomat.
Factoid: A Laddomat is triggered by a thermostat attached to the flu of the fire, once the fire starts then the Laddomat starts pumping, the fire goes out and the Laddomat stops pumping. The significant difference though is that the Laddomat circulates hot water from the stove back to the stove until the water gets to a sufficient heat for it to be sent to the store. The cold water from the store is mixed with this hot water returned to the stove, never is cold water sent directly to the stove. What is also good too is that it is fed slowly into the store, and the heat layer basically expands slowly down through the tank without mixing it all up, as a dedicated pump is inclined to.
I am now the proud owner of a Laddomat, all I need is someone to fit it.